Christus Santa Rosa says digging in downtown cemetery...

1of2Red flags mark the location where bone fragments have been found at the construction site at Children's Hospital of San Antonio on Thursday, May 18, 2017. UTSA archaeologists working the area that was once a cemetery, placed the flags where human remains were located, and will return to sift through the area. The site will be the new Prayer Garden at the hospital.Photo: Bob Owen, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

2of2Christus Santa Rosa Health System says it will not restart removal of remains from 200-year-old cemetery beneath the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio downtown.Photo: Bob Owen /San Antonio Express-News

A month after setting off controversy by unearthing the remains of about 70 people in a 200-year-old cemetery beneath the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio downtown, Christus Santa Rosa Health System has told descendants of those buried there that it will redesign a landscaping project so as not to disturb the graves.

Native American, Mexican, Tejano and Canary Island residents were laid to rest between 1808 and 1860 in the Catholic cemetery now under the hospital. After consulting with descendant groups, the hospital system, run by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, sent them an email Wednesday saying it will not restart its removal of the remains and has ordered a redesign of a planned prayer garden on the site.

Some of the remains had been relocated to the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Center for ArchaeologicalResearch. Trenches dug by UTSA archaeologists “have been covered with a layer of light sand,” the email said.

In an email Friday, hospital spokeswoman Melissa C. Krause confirmed the goals outlined to descendants, including the hospital’s intention to go back to state district court to undo what it first sought: have the hospital grounds no longer designated a cemetery.

Instead, it will ask a judge to preserve the cemetery designation, a central goal of the descendants. Without it, state law would have required the remains be reinterred in a perpetual care cemetery on the North Side. Descendants found that unacceptable to the historic nature of the site and the people of Bejar who built the city’s foundations out of the surrounding landscape.

“Our desire is an amicable resolution wherein we are able to provide a much-needed prayer garden and play area for the children while respecting the wishes of the descendant groups. It’s a process we are collectively working through,” Krause wrote.

Archaeologists have unearthed bone fragments belonging to an estimated 70 people. Documents in the Archdiocese of San Antonio archives suggest that the cemetery might have held several thousand people.

Representatives of descendants and other interested parties expressed surprise, pleasure and cautious optimism at the hospital’s reversal and said it reflected an understanding of their concerns and criticisms.

Reinterring remains back to the site is “definitely something we went in there asking for,” said Ramon Vasquez of the American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions, a nonprofit agency of the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation. “I’m pleased with it so far and with their communication.”

“We don’t have a lot of details,” said Mari Tamez, president of the Canary Islanders Descendants Association, who sounded more cautious. “But from what we hear right now, it does seem promising.”

Tamez and Vasquez said they want the redesigned prayer garden to include a recognition that the cemetery lies below.

“There are so many people buried in the campo santo,” Tamez said, using Spanish for holy ground. “They are there. We know they are there.”

She is among those who’ve said they don’t believe that graves were removed and reinterred at San Fernando Cemetery No. 1 on the West Side, as archdiocese officials long have maintained. “Because of that, we would like some positive recognition somewhere on that footprint that they were buried there,” she said.

Vasquez said he’d like to see the hospital erect a monument to the entire cemetery, not just the 70 remains that were found.

“We’re talking about at least 3,000 burial sites,” he said. “We want the hospital to at least recognize it as holy ground, as sacred ground.”

News of the hospital system’s email surfaced on Facebook on Thursday afternoon when a group called Alamo City Ancestry shared Krause’s email.

The excavation of remains during the final phase of a $135 million renovation project set off criticism from descendants that the hospital didn’t reach out to them. The hospital had announced its plans via legal notices published in the San Antonio Express-News, which descendants said met minimum legal requirements but constituted a lack of transparency.

Anthony Delgado, whose ancestors were among the first buried in the cemetery, worries that more of the city’s history will be bulldozed over or remain unrecognized. He cited the redevelopment of Alamo Plaza, where many Native American residents of Mission San Antonio de Valero, or the Alamo, were buried. He also noted the lack of recognition of the Camino Real, a colonial-era road, at Hemisfair, which is undergoing redevelopment.

Delgado said he hopes other entities learn from the hospital’s experience, “if nothing else that the city, county and business interests that have development plans downtown recognize the area they occupy is historical whether or not the city, county or state has designated it.”

Elaine Ayala is a Metro columnist for the San Antonio Express-News. A newspaper journalist for almost 40 years, she has held a variety of journalism jobs, including news reporter, features editor, blogger and editorial page editor. She has worked for six metropolitan dailies — the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, the Arizona Daily Star, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, the Austin American-Statesman, El Paso Times and the Express-News, where she has worked since 1996.

Her Metro column appears on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays on Page 2 of the Express-News. She covers San Antonio and Bexar County with special focus on communities of color, demographic change, Latino politics, migration, education and arts and culture.

The San Antonio native graduated from Memorial High School on the city’s West Side and the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in English. She is also a graduate of the Maynard Institute’s Editing Program, in which she also taught.

She has been involved in several journalism organizations throughout her career, most focused on increasing the number of minorities and women in U.S. newsrooms and fundraising for scholarships for students pursuing careers in the news media

She’s past president of the San Antonio Association of Hispanic Journalists (SAAHJ), the Austin Area Association of Hispanic Journalists and the El Paso Association of Hispanic Journalists. She has served on the board of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and has been a member of two other journalism groups, formerly known as the National Conference of Editorial Writers and American Association of Sunday and Features Editors.

Ayala is the recipient of several awards, including the Henry Guerra Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Journalism, awarded by SAAHJ; the Phillip True Award for Reporter of the Year, given by her peers at the Express-News; the inaugural Mission Heritage Award by the American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions; the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s inaugural Community Voice Award; a role-model award from the Martinez Street Women’s Center; the IMAGE of San Antonio Award given to women leaders and mentors; and the Governor’s Yellow Rose of Texas Award.

She has been inducted into the Edgewood Independent School District’s Hall of Fame, the San Antonio Women’s Hall of Fame and, most recently, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Hall of Fame.